| Spam, or its more formal name, unsolicited commercial e-mail, is a problem for every person in the world that uses the internet. Spam is mostly illegal but there are legal types of spam. The spam found in emails that are not requested, or that are on social networks and search engines can be illegal spam. Illegal spam masks the original destination and normally leads a consumer to a harmful site. Pharmaceutical spam leads to an affiliate site selling prescription drugs without requiring a prescription, along with other questionable products. These drugs range from erectile dysfunction drugs to pain medications. All of these drugs are being sold at very low prices per pill, making them more appealing to the consumer to buy. In this research, pharmaceutical spam subjects were manually analyzed and then grouped into spam campaigns based on common domains. The results of this project include: the determination of the connections among the spam campaigns, as well as the connections among the affiliate sites; the determination of the most dominate affiliate sites and spam campaigns that appeared throughout the nine month research period; and the determination that only about eight to ten affiliate programs are hiring affiliates to advertise their affiliate site using the spam campaigns identified in this research. |
